Jonathan Franzen wrote his bestselling novel The Corrections wearing a blindfold to avoid distraction from the outside world. If he used the same approach for his new book, Freedom, you can understand how he might have ended up with a few typos. Fortunately for him, and for the rest of us who produce drafts full of spelling mistakes even with our eyes open, publishers have copyeditors on hand, magnificent professional nitpickers and pedants.

Somewhere along the line, this process went awry for Franzen and Fourth Estate, the UK publisher of Freedom; instead of the final edit being sent to the printer, an earlier draft was sent. During the editing process, successive versions of the same novel flit back and forth between author, agent, typesetter and publisher in a series of email attachments, presumably all with variations on the same file name. At each stage, these drafts are sent to various other people, so it's easy to see how the mistake could have happened.

Having just completed the process of copyediting a new novel, I experienced a cold shiver when I heard about Freedom, because it's every author's worst nightmare. We're always deeply unsatisfied with our work, tweaking and fiddling and revising until at some point somebody takes it away from us and puts it between hard covers. Even then, we never really feel it's finished. I heard David Mitchell reading from his latest novel The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet earlier this year, and he was still self-correcting as he went along. "Oh, that's not good, is it?" he remarked, noticing that he'd repeated a word in two consecutive sentences.

So the idea of letting strangers see your work unfinished is as horrifying to most writers as going out in public without your trousers. If you're a perfectionist like Franzen, whose every word feels handpicked, polished and placed with precision, an error like this must leave you tearing your hair out. He blamed the printer, but this turns out to be wrong. It's an expensive mistake for someone; the first print run of 80,000 books will have to be pulped and HarperCollins is currently offering a free exchange for anyone who has already bought a copy.

It remains to be seen whether readers will want to exchange their "flawed" copies, though. As soon as Franzen spoke about the error at a public reading, there was a run on the venue's bookshop with people desperate to get their hands on what might become a collectors' item. People love the idea of imperfection and, for many readers, there's a curious pleasure in the thought of seeing behind the scenes. A glimpse of the work in progress can give a sense of the writer's process that might be almost more interesting to a fan than the final draft, especially if you're obsessive enough to compare and contrast.

Does it matter that the author would prefer you not to see their work in that state? The notebooks and scribbled-on typescripts of literary giants are worth a fortune to museums and university archives and offer fascinating insights into the formation of writers' work. The thought of destroying an author's drafts and revisions, even if they've expressly requested it, appals most literature enthusiasts. Rather than pulping the offending print run, Fourth Estate should make a virtue of its flaws and turn it into a special edition, like a director's cut. And it will allow people to make jokes about "The Corrections" around their offices for years to come.